LESLIE: Steve in Kansas, you’ve got The Money Pit and you want to talk about hot to prevent leaky ceiling. How can we help you out today?
STEVE: Well, we live in a house that was built in 1937. And sometime after the original house was built, there was an addition put on one end of the house that’s – the house is a two-story house but the addition is single-story. Where the roof ties into the wall – when we get a hard rain with a lot of wind, which we tend to do in Kansas once in a while, we get water that comes in and it leaks out – drips from the ceiling in that addition.
And we have a wood-burning fireplace. The chimney is made out of brick and I have caulked every place I can caulk. I’ve put sealer, I’ve had a new roof put on the addition and we still get water in there whenever it rains really hard. And I don’t know where it’s coming from.
TOM: Well, it’s the flashing that needs to be fixed to prevent leaky ceiling, obviously. So you say this is between the roof and the addition?
STEVE: Between the wall of the house and the addition.
TOM: The problem here is the flashing and unfortunately, sometimes when this is done, even when you put a new roof on it, they tend to reuse the old flashing. In your case, that flashing has got to be leaking. It’s letting water get in when the wind hits it just in the right direction. Really, what has to happen here is for the siding against that roof intersection to be removed or peeled back. Because the flashing has to go from under the roof well up under that siding to make it really, really tight to prevent leaky ceiling.
Now, there are different flashing products to do that with. Grace, who makes Ice & Water Shield, makes a flexible siding product that’s designed for this purpose. It’s like a membrane with an adhesive on it and you can literally seal in any of that kind of space against exactly this condition: that driving rain that’s going to come up between the roof shingles, through the traditional aluminum flashing and get into that space between the roof and the siding itself. It’s the only way to fix it.
STEVE: OK. Well, at least that gives me something to go on.
TOM: Alright, well, sorry it’s not better news but sometimes it’s better off to take it back to the beginning and do it right the first time. As we always say – that if you can do it once and do it right, you won’t have to do it again.
Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
STEVE: Thank you.
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